The invention relates to a method and apparatus for the projecting or shooting of footballs and the like.
It is a fact at the present time that many footballers have reached such a high degree of skill that they must be regarded as true artists in their control of the ball.
Balls are delivered and received with the greatest precision both as regards direction and striking force, and are received with head, chest or feet. The balls sometimes have to be stopped and for example kicked directly to a part of the goal where the goalkeeper is not expecting a shot.
The main difficulty of the footballer is that he has to carry out the individual actions with lightning speed in the vicinity of one or more opponents, in order to achieve any success at all. Perhaps this is a crucial difference between football, and for example, tennis.
In tennis the opponent is away on the other side. The game consists of a to and fro between one player and the other. The tennis player has to be in action himself during the entire game and has to receive balls and strike them back at a very high rate of frequency. It could almost be said that the tennis player himself is a ball striking machine.
In contrast to the tennis player, the individual footballer has only a relatively few opportunities during a game to show his best pieces of artistry, as of course evidenced by the response of the spectators.
The footballer has basically all his body in action except that in the negative sense his arms and hands must keep away from the ball whereas in the positive sense his other active parts influence the ball. He must practise his best performance, and the control of his body and limbs.
As has been found at the present time, the tennis player has two possibilities. He practises with a partner of equal skill. A weaker partner is not much use to him since the other player loses almost at every shot. The tennis player therefore uses some kind of ball throwing apparatus as a second possibility.
The footballer only has one possibility. He practises in the team. Apart from professional footballers it is very often difficult or even impossible to collect suitable partners.
In very recent times many attempts have been made also to provide footballers with mechanical partners. But it is not surprising that all such attempts have failed, since a machine cannot be a partner in a football team, a game in which friend and foe follow literally on one another's heels.